On the claimed “war exception” to the Constitution

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com, February 4, 2010

Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists. As The Washington Times’ Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing yesterday and he acknowledged its existence:

The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .

He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.”

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Although Blair emphasized that it requires “special permission” before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that “permission” is obtained: the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch. There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these “factors” are weighed. In last week’s post, I wrote about all the reasons why it’s so dangerous — as well as both legally and Consitutionally dubious — to allow the President to kill American citizens not on an active battlefield during combat, but while they are sleeping, sitting with their families in their home, walking on the street, etc. That’s basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial. Who could possibly support that?

But even if you’re someone who does want the President to have the power to order American citizens killed without a trial by decreeing that they are Terrorists (and it’s worth remembering that if you advocate that power, it’s going to be vested in all Presidents, not just the ones who are as Nice, Good, Kind-Hearted and Trustworthy as Barack Obama), shouldn’t there at least be some judicial approval required? Do we really want the President to be able to make this decision unilaterally and without outside checks? Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval? Shouldn’t we be at least as concerned about the President’s being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight? That seems much more Draconian to me.

It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn’t it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue “assassination warrants” or “murder warrants” — a repugnant idea given that they’re tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial — but isn’t that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself? And if the Fifth Amendment’s explicit guarantee — that one shall not be deprived of life without due process — does not prohibit the U.S. Government from assassinating you without any process, what exactly does it prohibit? Noting Scott Brown’s campaign to deny accused Terrorists access to lawyers and a real trial, Adam Serwer wrote:

This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing.

That’s absolutely true, but that also perfectly describes this assassination program — as well as a whole host of other now-Democratic policies, from indefinite detention to denial of civilian trials.

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Schmookler commentary:

The idea that the government can carry out an assassination against an American citizen is troubling on the face of it. But there are some issues here that make this, to my mind, a potentially justifiable practice.

First point: There are some kinds of struggle –one might say, some kinds of war– that are not on battlefields. Consider our ongoing conflict with al-Qaeda. I, for one, support the idea that when agents of al-Qaeda are located, and are not so situated that their arrest is possible, it is as acceptable to kill them where they are found as it is to kill the enemy on the battlefield in conventional conflicts.

I realize that there are also difficulties with this policy –how many innocents is it acceptable to put in danger to get what kinds of adversaries?– but in principle I support the idea that, in conflicts like this, the battle must be fought differently, and that, in some circumstances, things like drone attacks are a legitimate means of waging it.

But then there is the matter of targets that are American citizens.

If these lethal attacks were directed against American citizens on American soil, I’d unreservedly oppose them. At first I didn’t notice that this policy is just for instances where American citizens are abroad –and contributing to efforts to attack the United States– and my not noticing that limitation was part of my initial response being so negative.

But if one were to agree that X is a person who is engaged in terrorist warfare against the U.S., and if one were to agree that targeting that person would be appropriate under the existing circumstances if X were NOT an American citizen, is there any reason why X’s being an American citizen should weigh decisively against that judgment of appropriateness? Not so far as I can see.

So, I can imagine that such strikes are sometimes called for, and in such circumstances it seems to me that the citizenship of the proposed target is not a crucial variable.

The Need for the Constitutional Option

by Sen. Tom Udall
Huffington Post, January 26, 2010

[I've left off the beginning paragraphs of the piece]

The Constitution v. The Catch XXII

While I am convinced that our inability to function is our own fault, we have the authority within our Constitution to act.

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states, “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings…” Yet, at the beginning of the 111th Congress, unlike in the House of Representatives, there was no vote on a package of rules that would govern the body for the two years that comprises a term of Congress. As a result, 96 of my colleagues and I (three senators had an opportunity to vote on the last change to the rules in 1975) are bound by rules put in place decades ago and make conducting the business of the Senate nearly impossible.

Specifically, under the “filibuster rule” (Rule XXII), it is not possible to limit debate, or end a filibuster, without three-fifths, or 60, of all Senators voting to do so. In the past several years, the use — and abuse — of filibusters by both parties to obstruct the Senate from functioning has become the norm. But it hasn’t always been this way. Such cloture votes used to occur perhaps seven or eight times during a congressional session, but last Congress there were 112 - most occasioned simply by the threat of a filibuster. The use of the filibuster today dominates the Senate’s business at an irresponsible level, threatening our ability to operate.

[There appears here a graph showing the frequency with which the filibuster was used since 1919: the bars on the graph are so short as to be almost invisibile until 1979-80, when it climbs to 20, and then it gradually grows until hitting a kind of peak at 61 in the 2001-2002 session, but has now spiked up to 112 in the year just ended.]

Even worse, the rules make any effort to change them a daunting process. Currently the rules for the Senate continue from one Congress to the next. However, as last modified in 1975, even attempts to change the rules can be filibustered, and in fact require an even greater threshold (two-thirds, or 67 senators) be met than for the regular business of the Senate.

When the authors of the Constitution believed a supermajority vote was necessary, they clearly said so. And while the Constitution states that we may determine our own rules, it makes no mention that it require a supermajority vote to do so. In addition, a longstanding common law principle, upheld in Supreme Court decisions, states that one legislature cannot bind its successors. To require a supermajority to change the rules, as is our current practice, is to allow a Senate rule to trump our U.S. Constitution and bind future Senates. This should not be.

The Constitutional Option

The need to reform our rules is not a partisan issue — Senators of both parties have spoken out against the inability of the Senate to amend its own rules. Sen. Ted Kennedy, whom we all miss dearly, 35-years-ago said of the need to reform the rules, “the notion that a filibuster can be used to defeat an attempt to change the filibuster rule cannot withstand analysis. It would impose an unconstitutional prior restraint on the parliamentary procedure in the Senate. It would turn Rule XXII into a Catch XXII.” And, as my esteemed colleague from Utah, Sen. Hatch, stated in a National Review article in 2005, “both conservative and liberal legal scholars, including those who see no constitutional problems with the current filibuster campaign, agree that a simple majority can change Senate rules at the beginning of a new Congress.”

In the 1950s, a bipartisan group of senators had had enough. On behalf of himself and 18 others, New Mexico’s own Sen. Clinton Anderson attempted to limit debate and control the use of filibuster by adopting the 1917 belief of Sen. Thomas Walsh that each new Congress brings with it a new Senate entitled to consider and adopt its own rules. On January 3, 1953 Anderson moved that the Senate immediately consider the adoption of rules for the Senate of the 83rd Congress. As the junior senator from New Mexico, I have inherited Sen. Clinton Anderson’s seat and in 2011, at the beginning of the 112th Congress, I will follow in the tradition of Sen. Anderson and call on the Senate to exercise its constitutional right to adopt its rules of procedure by a simple majority vote.

My party is currently in the majority in the Senate. And as the ebb and flow of politics continues, one day we will be in the minority. But my position on this issue will remain the same. In a world that is constantly changing, our democracy requires a Congress that can respond effectively to the issues of the day without, as my colleague Sen. Robert Byrd once said, being, “obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past.”

I, at least, have revived hopes.

But even if that is the case, an important question remains. Why are liberals so bad at fighting?

This question can be particularized into a few sub questions, such as: why did Obama take a year to start trying to make the Republicans pay a political price for their lying and their amoral quest for political advantage even at the cost of their nation at a time of several national crises? And before that, why did the Democrats in Congress, faced with a presidency whose lawlessness exceeded anything in American history, and whose virtually every communication was an exercize in deception and manipulation, remain so passive and wimpy when their oath of office required so much more?

Why is it that, while the Republicans tend to make a war out of almost EVERYTHING, the Democrats seem willing to make a war out of almost NOTHING?

These are serious questions. The problem they raise has certainly been noticed before– over the years, and in these days as well.

In a piece on Huffington Post in late January, Washington Monthly writer Steve Benen wrote:

Referring, for example, to Republican opposition to funding U.S. troops last year, Durbin said, “Some of the votes [Republicans] cast — we would be on trial for treason if we had voted against defense appropriations in the midst of a war.”

He added, “They did it with impunity.”

That’s true; they did. Every reckless, irresponsible, hypocritical, dangerous, and incoherent step Republicans take, they do so “with impunity.”

It’s not exactly a mystery. Republicans believe they can use tactics that ignore election results, make a mockery of democratic norms, and effectively prevent a governing majority from functioning because they’re pretty confident that Democrats won’t effectively raise a fuss, the media won’t care, and the public won’t know. And they’re right.

And then Benen goes on to propose the thought experiment in which the Democrats and Republicans were in the opposite positions from the situation today, and the Democrats were being as obstructionist as the Republicans are actually being now:

Now, in this hypothetical, what do you suppose the political climate would look like? Would the huge Republican majority simply wring its hands? Would GOP officials decide it’s time to try “bipartisan” governing? Would Republicans shrink from pursing their policy agenda? Would political reporters just accept this as how the system is supposed to operate, a dynamic in which a huge majority is simply preventing from governing?

Or would every single day be another opportunity for Republicans to be apoplectic about Democratic obstructionism? Indeed, how many marches on Washington would Fox News organize, demanding that Democrats allow the governing majority to function?

It’s not enough for Democrats to say, “If we stopped Republicans from governing, they’d scream bloody murder.” If Dems believe that, then maybe it’s time to scream bloody murder.

Benen ends up recommending to the Democrats that they consider what the Republicans would do were the situation reversed and then “do that.” I would NOT concur with that approach, since what today’s Republicans would do would be fully marinaded in lies and deceptions. But what need is there for lies when the truth –and especially the moral truth– should be such a potent weapon against those who practice the Culture of the Lie? If Bene’s point is that just as the Republicans would put up a fight, so should the Democrats, I agree with that.

But the Democrats, fully armed with such moral truth for most of the past decade, ever since the depravity of today’s Republican Party (led then by the Bushite regime) became visible, have left that powerful and righteous sword in its sheath. They left the Bushites largely unconfronted for offenses orders of magnitude beyond anything that got Richard Nixon pushed out of office. And they allowed the Republicans make gains this past year while practicing the most blatantly dishonest and degrading form of politics to force the failure of the only president our country has.

Why? What is it about liberals that gets in the way? Is there anything in the liberal vision or worldview that interferes with effectiveness in the waging of such political warfare? Anything in the liberal character structure?

By Tim Rutten
Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2010

It has been more than four decades since the Congress of the United States has been able to summon the will to pass a major piece of social legislation. Not since 1965, when Medicare and the Voting Rights Act both overcame decades of opposition to become law, has Congress proved itself up to the task.

Significant healthcare reform is all but dead for this session, and the chances of substantively addressing the regulatory breakdown that allowed Wall Street’s irresponsible speculation to precipitate the worst global financial crisis since the Depression seem to recede with each passing day. So too the prospects for passage of further stimulus measures to remedy the crisis of unemployment and underemployment that continues to ravage the lives of families in states from Michigan to California.

In the face of these daunting issues, what was it that preoccupied the Senate on the eve of its long weekend recess? The legislative drama du jour is the standoff between the White House and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who has put a personal hold on more than 70 executive branch appointments until the Obama administration agrees to fund a couple of pork-barrel projects he has earmarked for his state. One involves tens of millions of dollars for an FBI laboratory focusing on improvised explosives — something the bureau doesn’t think it needs. The other involves contract specifications for an aerial tanker that Northrop Grumman and Airbus would manufacture in Alabama, if they win the deal. (Boeing also is competing for the plane, which it would build in Topeka, Kan., and Seattle.)

Unless the administration agrees to give Shelby what he wants, he intends to invoke an archaic senatorial privilege that allows him to prevent the chamber from considering any of the administration’s nominees to executive branch vacancies, no matter how crucial. Without the 60 votes to force cloture — another archaic convention — there’s nothing the Democrats or the White House can do.

Outside the Senate, Shelby’s conduct would be called extortion; inside the chamber, it’s a “parliamentary tactic.”

It’s also the sort of shabby situation that brings into sharp focus both the sources of congressional dysfunction and the popular discontent on both the left and right with the congressional parties. Earmarks and pork are anathema to a majority of conservatives and independents; the Senate’s outdated, made-for-obstruction rules and susceptibility to special interests are a source of increasing frustration to liberals and some independents. Yet, here we have one senator from one Southern state obstructing with impunity an entire nation’s business — purely for his narrow constituency’s financial interests.

You don’t have to attend a “tea party” convention to see the corrosive effect this sort of otherworldly political navel-gazing has on American attitudes toward the institutions of national government and the parties vying to control them. Evidence of the damage is scattered throughout the recent polls:

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, for example, found that although 52% of the nation’s voters retain a favorable view of President Obama, only 38% have a similar appraisal of the Democratic Party. The Republicans fare even worse; just 30%, fewer than

1 in 3 voters, view the GOP favorably.

A recent CBS News poll found that nearly half of all Republicans, 45%, disapprove of their party’s congressional delegation.

A national Washington Post/ABC News poll found that just 24% of Americans, fewer than 1 in 4, trust congressional Republicans, like Shelby, “to make the right decisions for the country’s future.” (Wonder why?) The House and Senate Democrats didn’t fare all that better, and are trusted by just 32%. Forty-seven percent of those polled — still less than half — have confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions.

When people’s mistrust of their elected officials and the parties reaches these levels, there is little for political leaders to do but take counsel from their own anger and anxieties — and, these days, the popular mood fairly seethes with both those things. Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics, yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.

In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that “there are times — they mark the danger point for a political system — when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing.”

“As I said after the oral arguments, I don’t have any strong objection to the Court’s ruling that the restrictions placed on showing Hillary: the Movie were unconstitutional. Such a holding would be quite defensible even under a legal framework that tried to balance First Amendment interests and the importance of fair elections. The real question was whether the case would be decided in narrow or broad terms, and alas it’s very much the latter. The Court overruled both a 20-year precedent permitting greater restrictions on corporate speech and parts of a more recent ruling upholding the McCain-Feingold Act, and has essentially held that for-profit corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.

“On a related note, it seems worth nothing again that Chief Justice Roberts’s purported “minimalism” — so often touted by his defenders, including liberals who should know better — is an empty fraud. At least in this case — unlike previous campaign finance rulings — the Court was willing to overturn precedents explicitly. But, certainly, this should serve as a reminder that it’s farcical to claim that modern judicial conservatives stand for substantive “minimalism” or “judicial restraint.”

Nowadays, it seems that a disproportionate number of comics are black: generations of persecution and suffering are apparently good for producing humor, presumably because humor is a good way of coping with persecution and suffering.

Humor from various cultures has some common elements, but at the same time every culture has its own deep characteristics that imbue its various cultural expressions, including humor. Over the years, I’ve become aware of some of the patterns in Jewish humor. In this piece, I’ll present one of the patterns that has intrigued me. Not only intrigued me, but appealed to me deeply. I’ll tell four of my favorite Jewish stories: they’re not ALL jokes, per se, but with each, at the end, one responds with some variety of laugh. At least I do.

The Jewish characteristic that expresses itself in all four of these stories, according to my interpretation, is the great investment the culture makes in LOGIC. A volume could be written about the role of logic in Jewish culture. Not by me, but a volume could be written. Actually, I expect that a decent search would disclose that more than a few such volumes HAVE been written, but I haven’t made the search, and I’m not planning to.

People of the book. People of the text. People of the ceaseless work of using logic to interpret the meaning of the text and the application of God’s law.

My father was, he said, “agnostic.” (How many four-year-olds are familiar with that word? My father’s son was.) But, of course, as the son of two Jewish immigrants from Russia, who never got high school degrees because–well, because they were Jews barred from such advantages and then they were refugees from pogroms– but whose shelves were full of books and whose conversations were full of the process of a variety of disputation influenced by generations of argumentation over the meaning of sacred texts, my agnostic father was also a Jew.

And as his son, I learned from an early age that logic played a central role in the pursuit of truth, and in the defense of one’s position.

So, I imagine that background primed me to appreciate these Jewish stories that play with logic.

I say “play with logic” because at the heart of each of these stories is not logic, but the turning of logic around to exploit or expose some underlying reality.

First, the two stories that turn logic around to EXPLOIT some hidden reality. And then two stories in which the reversal of logic serves to EXPOSE a hidden reality.

In a way, each of these stories constitute a Critique of Logic. Which, for a culture that employs logic as its central tool, constitutes the very kind of shocking upheaval that is, across cultures, so central to humor.

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Story # 1:

One of those Jew-hating figures arose in one of those places where Jews lived but precariously. (Precarious like a fiddler on the roof, one might say.) And this figure –was he a King, or an evil advisor to a manipulable King?– decided that all the Jews should be killed, because they’d done something or other. It gets decided –did the head rabbi manage to achieve at least this CHANCE of survival– that two pieces of paper would be placed into a container, one of them saying “Guilty” or “Kill the Jews” and the other saying “Innocent” or “Let them be.” The head rabbi would pick one of them out of the container and which one he picked would be the verdict and fate of the Jews.

Fine. A 50-50 chance. Better than sometimes.

Problem was, the evil whatever-he-was had no intention of leaving things to chance. Instead, he was going to inscribe BOTH pieces of paper with the death sentence, and thus for sure the rabbi would choose one that enabled him to kill the jews.

Fortunately, the rabbi was no fool. He understood the intention of the evil whatever-he-was. And so this was what he did.

At the crucial moment, he picked out one of the pieces of paper and before he or anyone else could see it he popped it into his mouth and swallowed it.

The evil whatever cried out, how can you do that, how can we know what it said now that you’ve swallowed it.

And the rabbi responded: No problem, evil whatever. Just look at whatever the remaining piece of paper says, and whatever it says, the one I swallowed must have said the opposite.

Hah! From can’t win to can’t lose!

Commentary: The “critique” of logic” here is that the head rabbi deliberately plays upon a false premise. What’s false is the assumption that, as stipulated in the arrangement, the two pieces of paper contain opposite statements. But the fact that they are identical gives the rabbi the chance to reverse the false conclusion to one that means certain death for his people to one that means certain survival for them.

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Story # 2

A very learned rabbi would travel from town to town. In each, a crowd would gather to hear him speak about the holy texts and talk with him, and then he’d go on to the next village. He traveled by cart, driven by a man who’d been with him for years.

One day, as they were about to reach another village, where they’d never been before, the driver said to the rabbi, “Wherever we go, the people treat you as a special person and ignore me completely. It gets to be a bit hard to take. How about this once, you and I switch places, and I’ll be the rabbi and you the driver. I’ve heard you give your speech so many times, I myself could give it word for word.”

The rabbi sympathized with the driver, and so consented to his proposal. The rabbi drove the cart, and the driver, dressed as the rabbi, stood up in front of the people who gathered round and did an impeccable job of delivering the talk.

All went quite well until, near the end of the discussion period, a man from the village asked a question so abstruse, so outside the matters the driver had heard discussed on other occasions, that the pretend-rabbi had not a clue how to answer it.

His heart started pounding. Then he saw what to do, and he replied: “I’m surprised that an intelligent man would ask so simple a question. Why, even my driver could answer that.”

At which he gestured to the actual rabbi who stood up and answered the man most cogently.

Commentary: This story is cast in the same form as the previous one, about the swallowing of the piece of paper: because of a false premise (”the two pieces of paper say the opposite thing” in the first instance, and “I’m the rabbi and he’s the driver” in this case), the clever man can escape from danger by leading others to draw an erroneous conclusion (”the paper I swallowed must have said ‘Let them live’” in the first case, “I could have answered that question, if my presumably less knowledgeable driver can answer it” in this case).

The delight of such reversals of logic comes not only from the clever escape from danger. It also comes from the sabotaging of one of the central disciplines of the culture, just as the Marx Brothers make us laugh with their wanton disregard of all proprieties and moral strictures.

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Here now is the second set of stories.

Story # 3 (You may recognize this joke from its appearance in the opening sequence of “A Fiddler on the Roof”):

Shmendrick, the Beggar, walks up to Shlomo, the successful merchant, calling out, “Alms for the poor! Alms for the poor.” Shlomo reaches into his pocket, takes out a coin, and gives it to Shmendrick, saying, “Here’s a kopek.”

Shmendrick looks at the coin and says, “One kopek? Last week you gave me two kopeks.”

Shlomo replies, “I had a bad week.”

Says Shmendrick: “So, if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”

Commentary: There’s nothing SAID in this exchange that constitutes a commentary on logic and its uses. But it doesn’t have to be said. It’s there in the situation.

I love it.

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Story # 4

It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when man asks God to forgive his many sins of the past year.

In the synagogue, during the Yom Kippur service, the rabbi throws himself on the ground and calls out, “”Oh, God. Before You, I am nothing!”

Seeing this, the most prominent member of the congregation (a rich banker), gets out of his seat and prostrates himself on the ground next to the rabbi, likewise shouting, “Oh, God. Before You, I am nothing!”

Now Mendel, a poor tailor, from the back of the building gets up and throws himself onto the floor in the aisle, and declares, “Oh, God. Before You, I am nothing!”

At this, the banker leans over to the rabbi, and says derisively, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

Commentary: Can you see why I pair this with the “So, if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?” story?

Decoding Obama’s Health Care Plan

by Jonathan Chait
The New Republic, February 5, 2010

At a fundraiser last night, President Obama laid out his vision for health care reform. This is interesting:

Mr. Obama said that once Congressional Democrats had worked out their differences and settled on a final bill, he would push for a vibrant, public debate over the health care legislation. He said he planned “to call on our Republican friends to present their ideas.”

“What I’d like to do is have a meeting whereby I am sitting with the Republicans, sitting with the Democrats, sitting with health care experts and let’s just go through these bills,” Mr. Obama said. “Their ideas, our ideas. Let’s walk through them in a methodical way, so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense. And then I think that we have got to move forward on a vote. We have got to move forward on a vote.”

Mr. Obama said that Americans were apprehensive about the health care legislation because there was too much misinformation that he would now work to clear up.

“They are certain that they would have to go onto a government plan, which isn’t true,” the president said. “But that’s still a perception a lot of people have. They are still pretty sure that they would have to give up their doctor. They are still pretty sure that if they are happy with their health care plan, that it’s bad for them. They are still positive that this is going to add to the deficit. So there is a lot of information out there that people understandably are concerned about.”

He continued, “That’s why I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks and then let’s go ahead and make a decision. And it may be that if Congress decides, if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not. And that’s how democracy works, and there will be elections coming up and they will be able to make a determination and register their concerns one way or another during election time.”

Is this wishy-washy capitulation? Greg Sargent is worried:

Maybe I’m misreading this. But if you look at the transcript of Obama’s remarks at a fundraiser last night, it seems like the President was at least raising the possibility that health reform may not happen.

To be clear, Obama didn’t say this was a desirable outcome — quite the opposite, in fact — but he did seem to suggest that it’s possible.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I actually had to read Obama’s remark twice to fully understand what he’s getting at, but now that I have, it seems pretty clear. I think Obama sees the perception that the process is broken — that it’s backroom deals and “ignoring the will of the people” — to be the biggest impediment to passage of the bill. So he’s proposing a remedy to that perception.

The most important part is what Obama says should happen first: Democrats should settle their differences and work out a final bill. That’s crucial. Then he wants to sit down with both parties, and health care experts, and walk through the details in a methodical way. I’d guess he’s imagining a process that might look a little like his back-and-forth with House Republicans — they present him with wild claims about a government takeover, and he calmly responds. They insist that their ideas are better, and he gets to show that they’re not. Then you vote. In other words, a debate in which he gets to take center stage, on top of the kabuki theater of a House debate. That way Obama gets to demonstrate that the plan he has is the product of having considered all the alternatives and arriving at the best way to solve the problem, not just cooking up a backroom deal. The idea seems to be to use his wonky, technocratic style to counteract the process-based objections and sell the bill.

Another key element of Obama’s remarks is his insistence that Congress actually have a vote. Let me repeat that section:

That’s why I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks and then let’s go ahead and make a decision. And it may be that if Congress decides, if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not.

He’s saying that Congress can’t just ignore the issue and let it die in quiet. It needs to have a vote, relatively soon, and make a decision, rather than decide by default to keep the status quo. This strikes me as enormously positive news.

*****************

“Symmetries…show up in transformations involving context or scale or shape. Mountains and molehills share roughly the same shape, as do swirling stars in galaxies and the swirling cream in coffee. Snail shells and sunflowers repeat the same patterns over and over because their genetic instructions encode a symmetry of proportion: The next row of petals or twist of shell always grows so that it remains in exactly the same proportion to the one that follows and the one that proceeds. ‘This notion of symmetry…,’ writes Rothstein, ‘is close to what we call, in other contexts, harmony.’

…

“All of these are symmetries, and all speak of deep connections that lie buried underneath the superficial differences. They are the same kinds of symmetries, Rothstein argues, that create the emotional responses we ‘feel’ in the presence of beauty– in math or music. ‘What we ‘feel’ in such moments is the analogy of the part and the whole, object and other object, relation and relation.’…

“A variation of this equation lies at the heart of the Golden Rule, which tells us to do unto others as we would like others to do unto us.”
(pp. 178-179)

by Meteor Blades
Daily Kos, Jan 29, 2010

We all know what inequality in wealth and income means when it comes to political clout. And for weathering economic adversity. And for the kind of lifelong head start or hold back that can be given to offspring. The effects are gigantic and extend everywhere. In more economically equal societies, as British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, people do better on every metric, much better, whether it’s drug addiction, teen pregnancies, homicide or life-span.

What possible good can come from epidemiologists poking around in economics, and in the United States, well outside their usual scholarly arenas? Quite a lot, writes Sam Pizzigati, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and proprietor of the on-line web-site Too Much:

“If you want to know why one country does better or worse than another,” as Wilkinson and Pickett note simply, “the first thing to look at is the extent of inequality.”

The United States, the developed world’s most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on every quality-of-life indicator that Wilkinson and Pickett examine. Portugal and the UK, nations with levels of inequality that rival the United States, rank near that same bottom.

Japan and the Scandinavian nations, the world’s most equal major developed nations, show the exact opposite trend line. They all rank, on yardstick after yardstick, at or near the top.

And we see the same pattern within the United States. America’s most equal states — New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Vermont — all consistently outperform the least equal, states like Mississippi and Alabama.

People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies, Wilkinson and Pickett emphasize continually, but all people.

If you have a middle class income in an unequal society, you’re going to be more stressed and less healthy — mentally and physically — than someone with the same income in a more equal society.

Earlier this month the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that about one million taxpayers will have an income of more than $500,000 this year. They will collect $200 billion more in income than the 80 million American taxpayers who make $40,000 or less. Not surprisingly, executives at the top corporations figure prominently in that elite group of a million.

[graph here of "Share of Income Earned by the Top 10 percent"]

According to economist Emmanuel Saez, who has made a career of studying the impact of income inequality, in 2007, the most recent year for which we have full data, the ratio of CEO pay to the average paycheck was 344 to one. Because of the recession, it’s estimated that the ratio will decrease to 317 to one in 2010. In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the average ratio fluctuated between 30 and 40 to one.

The slight decrease in inequality we’ve seen during the Great Recession will be only temporary unless significant changes in regulations and progressive taxation are imposed. And that won’t be easy given the brainwashing visited on America by right-wing think-tanks that have propagandized us for three decades with soothing talk about the benefits of deregulation, privatization and what Pizzigati so aptly calls “wealth worship.”

Just how bad the trend has been over the past 30 years can be seen by comparing with an earlier era:

• In 1955, tax records showed that the 400 richest people in the U.S. were worth an average $12.6 million (adjusted for inflation). In 2006, the 400 richest were worth $263 million.

• In 1955, the richest Americans paid an average of 51.2% of their income in taxes under a system with a top rate of 90%, but with lots of loopholes. By 2006, the top tier paid 17.2% of their incomes.

• At the same time, wages for most Americans stagnated from 1979 to 1998, and by 2000 the median male wage was below the 1979 level, despite productivity increases of 44.5 percent. Between 2002-2004, two years of the “jobless recovery,” the inflation-adjusted median household income declined $1669 a year.

• To cover this loss, households in the aggregate boosted their credit-card debt 315% between 1989 and 2006.

“Over the past 30 years, the income of the top 1%, adjusted for inflation, doubled: the top one-tenth of 1% tripled, and the one-one-hundredth quadrupled,” says Pizzigati. “Meanwhile, the average income of the bottom 90% has gone down slightly. This is a stunning transformation.”

….

by Jeffrey Rosen
The New Republic, January 27, 2010

One of the most dramatic moments in President Obama’s State of the Union was his attack on the Supreme Court with the justices arrayed in front of him. “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests–including foreign corporations–to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama declared. This prompted Justice Samuel Alito to shake his head and mouth the words “not true.” Alito had good reason to feel defensive–he replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who recently criticized the 5-4 Citizens United campaign finance decision and suggested she would have voted the other way–and bloggers are already attacking Alito’s inappropriate intervention as a “You lie!” moment. Even more significant is what it says about Obama’s welcome readiness to attack the Court’s conservative majority for its judicial activism in the future. The conservative justices may have calculated that they could strike down campaign finance restrictions without provoking a full-blown presidential backlash. But it takes only a few high-profile presidential attacks to tar a Court as activist in the eyes of history. During the 1930s, the Supreme Court upheld a great deal of FDR’s economic recovery program, but the New Deal Court is remembered today as a group of unprincipled activists because of just a handful of high profile decisions that FDR prominently attacked.